How to Spend Less Time in an Airport Security Line

Share
 Image result for Airport Security Line

One question looms over most business travelers: How soon should I leave for the airport?

The road warrior may wield a decent sense of traffic hassles, terminal trekking and rental car-return times, but the length of one’s stay in a TSA security line is largely a matter of guesswork. Screening throws in a wildcard that can make you late for the gate—and your flight.
It’s one reason airports are keen to post wait-times, though usually they’re available only when you’re at the airport.
Airports, airlines and technology companies have deployed a variety of methods over the past 16 years of TSA screening to assess queue times. Some have used people to manually count passenger movement or gathered crowdsourced data from actual travelers, which is how the Transportation Security Administration collects wait information for its “MyTSA” app.
Other methods involve overhead cameras to mark entrance and exit times; sensors that detect the progress of travelers’ mobile phones through various bottlenecks; and predictive analytics that sort through an airport’s passenger volume and the TSA’s processing speeds at a particular time and location to formulate a decent guess.

Now, into this mix comes a new tool, one that uses a form of radar. It’s being tested at four U.S. airports by an analytics company called Iinside and incorporated into a mobile app with partner TripIt. If the app works, it may finally present travelers with the ultimate piece of the puzzle that allows them to waste as little time as possible.

TripIt, a travel app owned by SAP Concur, said  that it plans to input the Iinside data from airports in Austin, Texas, Orlando, Florida, Denver and Phoenix. Users will receive an alert three hours before a flight with current wait times, as well as real-time updates. Airport maps in the app will also show the nearest security checkpoint and which ones have the shortest lines.

TripIt will also merge the TSA wait data with commercially available traffic-flow information and airline flight status to advise travelers when to start driving to the airport, based on their GPS location. Over time, as the technology matures, security line wait-time data “should be part of your travel plans,” said Jen Moyse, TripIt’s director of product—especially for business travelers with tight schedules.

Iinside expects to equip additional airports with its hardware, which uses LiDAR-based technology and Bluetooth, to mix traffic movements with machine-learning to adjust projected wait times. The Anaheim, California-based company is targeting most of the 30 largest U.S. airports, which account for almost 85 percent of annual U.S. airline passengers.

“The simple knowledge of how long it will take them to get through security is reducing traveler anxiety and increasing satisfaction for one of the most stressful stages of modern-day travel,” Iinside said in a statement.

 

Share
Tags: ,